Who wants to live in a walled garden?

My article for The Diplomat takes a look at state censorship of the Internet – and the increasingly creative ways people sidestep it – in light of events in Egypt and news from North Korea.

Egypt’s government enforced an unprecedented Internet blackout to stymie protestors calling for President Hosni Mubarak to resign. North Korea’s government – according to a defector – is building a walled garden to keep most of the Web out:

A walled garden state of the kind envisaged by the North Korean ‘roadmap’ would be a totalitarian mirror image of self-contained apps. There would be no equivalent trade-off between government and citizen. Internet users subject to ‘mosquito net’ filtering would be completely cut off from what Anderson calls the ‘wide-open Web of peer production, the so-called generative web where everyone is free to create what they want.’

Read more at Reality-based Community